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5 social media tools small business owners should use everyday

Small business owners hear a lot about how social media can help their businesses. Still, there isn’t much advice about how to use social media or what tools might be helpful to make the most of Facebook or Twitter. Here are five social media tools we recommend to use every day to help make the most of your social media efforts and stay focused on your goals.

Although these are some recommended tools, you’ll want to do your own research to find the right tools that will make sense for your social media efforts.

Hootsuite

Managing multiple social media accounts can be time consuming. If you share some of the same information and updates over multiple platforms, Hoostuite can be of great help. Many small business owners don’t have time to spend hours on social media every day. Despite this, a lot of businesses do find value in sharing information about their businesses and products there. If you could use a tool that helps monitor and post to all your social media accounts together, you could reap the benefits without needing to make it a full-time job.

Hootsuite is a social media management platform. It enable users to schedule all their social media posts across multiple platforms, in one interface. You can schedule updates weeks and months in advance. Hootsuite also offers analytics reporting on your posts. Using this, you can see which performed well and where you could improve in the future.

Canva

Canva is a platform where you can create and store your social media imagery. The best part is, you don’t need to be a designer to use it.

You can create Facebook banners, Twitter posts, email headers, blogs and more. With Canva, anyone can use templates that are pre-sized. This means the images you choose will fit the platform like a glove—regardless of whether you’re to Facebook or Instagram.

What’s more, many of the templates in Canva are free – the rest are just $1 each. So, you can start making images to post to your social media without breaking the bank.

Piktochart

Infographics are a great way to engage your audience on social media. If you want to create infographics but lack the budget to hire a graphic designer or agency to produce them, Piktochart makes it pretty easy. With Piktochart, all you need is to drag and drop images into templates. There are thousands of illustrations, pictures, and icons. Moreover, there are 500+ templates that include business, holiday themes and more. The templates are easy to use and everything you’ll need to create an infographic is at your fingertips.

Piktochart also has templates for presentations, posters, and reports. With the platform’s free package, you can create an unlimited number of infographics. The free version additionally gives you access to 4,000 icons and full-editor functions. There are also paid versions that offer more storage and access to more templates, hi-res exports, and watermark removal.

Bit.ly

Once you’ve created all this content with links back to your website, you’ll probably want to track and measure it. You might want to know how many people clicked the links, a product page, or any place on your site. Bit.ly is a link shortener that makes the links fit better with sites that have a limited character count (like Twitter). Additionally, it helps you track the clicks back to your site. This makes it easier to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

For a price, bit.ly will provide you with custom short-links that resemble your business’s name. This can be a great tool for branding consistency. By using this, users can get a better idea of where the short link leads, before clicking it.

Bit.ly’s free version will save all your short-links for 30 days. That means you have time to analyse your links and see what platforms and geographies the clicks are coming from.

Tagboard

Whether you’re just starting off with a hashtag campaign on one platform or are a seasoned hashtag pro across multiple channels, you might want to consider Tagboard. With this platform, you can track the use of your hashtags across social media in a search and display interface . This way, you can see who is using your hashtag and where they are using it, not to mention the context in which they are using it. You can also sort which platforms to filter and display the posts containing your hashtag however you would like to review them.

You can create multiple boards on Tagboard. For more sophisticated paid accounts, you can track live video streams on Facebook and YouTube, integrate into displays at your business’s event, and more.

Small businesses can use social media to find new customers, keep in touch with current customers, and grow their businesses. These five tools might even make it easier. While the above tools are probably amongst the most well-known and recommended, you’ll need to do some experimenting to see if they’ll do the job for you.

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